《The Lone Wanderer in the Wasteland (Survival in the Cryptocurrency Circle)》
The scar on my right ear was left when I was driven away by a pride of lions. While all the hunters on the savannah are chasing the migrating wildebeest herd, I always fixate on the direction of the vultures circling above — there often lies a zebra, its insides torn out by hyenas, dead for less than three hours.
The hyena queen, Akka, often mocks my fur color, saying the gray and white mixed hair looks like a piece of moldy cheese under the moonlight. But she doesn't know that it is this very coat that helped me evade last week's rain of poisoned arrows: when thirty hyenas charged at the buffalo herd behind her, I lay behind a dead tree, counting the fallen kin. When the seventeenth wail echoed, the herd suddenly turned and charged, blood-soaked horns dragging the twitching remains of a hyena.
The market before the rainy season is the most dangerous. Last night, low-frequency roars from an agitated elephant herd echoed in the river bend, and the entire savannah rushed towards that direction. I climbed up a baobab tree against the wind and saw three prides of lions working together to block the elephant herd. Just as the young bull's sharp tusks pierced the spine of a lioness, a poacher's jeep suddenly burst out from the west, startling the elephant herd and instantly breaking the encirclement.
Beneath the tree came the sound of flesh being torn apart. Two leopards rolled together fighting over half a leg of antelope, and I took the opportunity to snatch the kidney leaf leech they knocked down — this thing can be traded for three days' worth of meat on the black market. In the distance, murky water floated from a crocodile, signaling the wildebeest to cross the river. But I know that the first wildebeest to reach the opposite shore will trigger an ambush by cheetahs, while the last will be dragged into deep water by crocodiles.
The secret to surviving lies in the cracks between the moon and the sun. This morning, I found half a rotting antelope head in the bushes, with maggots wriggling in its eye sockets. As the vultures began to dive, I deliberately kicked over stones to scare them away, then turned around and dug out a fresh rabbit hole from under the thorns — those scavenger birds will never learn, the scent of rotting flesh will mask the smell of living creatures within a hundred meters.
While the skull of the hyena queen was still hanging on the acacia tree drying, I was chewing on the tendons I had stolen from the cheetah's mouth. The moment the first raindrop of the rainy season hit the tip of my nose, I suddenly understood: the true hunting on the savannah never happens in the noisy encirclements, but is hidden in the unlit shadow of every living being's turn.
